Your income predicts how well you can socially distance

“What I liked about the study is that it provides data on something that people have been saying for some time, in sort of hand waves,” says Andrew Noymer, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine, who wasn’t involved in this research. “People have been talking about the revolution of working from home, Zoom and all that. But if your job is welding pieces of metal together or something like that, Zoom—as good as it’s gotten—has not quite perfected that yet. This actually shows, based on these mobile device pings, that what we thought was happening is happening.”